GC Update — ArtDEX v1.1

7 min readFeb 4, 2023

Minting, Multipool, Creator Tips & More!

Hello Geniuses! Our new NFT exchange ArtDEX has been out for a month now. We’re glad to see users experimenting with NFT liquidity pools and trying out new NFT drops on ArtDEX. A week ago we also wrapped up the Salsa Shepardz drop, completing our first ArtDEX-native sale.

If you missed the Salsa Shepardz sale, you have a second chance! Check out the Shepardz Adoption Drive.

At this point we’ve enjoyed a solid launch on mainnet with no security issues or contract vulnerabilities found. We’ve also gotten great feedback from users and creators on what is enjoyable about ArtDEX, and what can be improved upon.

It’s important to note that this is a very new tool, so this initial launch period has been a helpful test to see how the Tezos community would use ArtDEX. We’ve logged the feedback, reviewed the Shepardz drop, and put together a new update that should take ArtDEX to the next level.

We’d like to announce ArtDEX v1.1, an update releasing within the next week. This update will be packed with new features, so we’d like to prepare users in advance with an overview of what’s coming. We’ll start the summary with the most important feature coming to ArtDEX: native minting.

ArtDEX Minting

One current weakness of ArtDEX is the difficulty of releasing new creations directly on ArtDEX.

Creators have no ability to make native drops, and they have told us that it’s too difficult to migrate from another mintery. We hear you.

We’ve completed the new ArtDEX Mintery, which is a shared minting contract that will allow users to mint directly on ArtDEX. The minting process is similar to HEN, TEIA, and Versum, meaning each new mint is an independent FA2-standard token that can have up to 10,000 editions.

Our mintery item symbol is ARTWK, a shortened version of artwork.

Our interface will automatically handle IPFS uploading through our new gateway, similar to other top-class minting experiences. We will start by allowing image/audio/video and move to support new files like documents and 3D models in the near future.

The new mintery on ArtDEX is important, but it’s only the first step. We want to make both minting and pool deployment super simple for creators, so we’ve developed 2 shortcut contracts that will help.

Quickminter

With Quickminter, you can mint new ARTWKs and place them in a Sell pool on ArtDEX in just one transaction!

After entering your ARTWK details, you can decide how many editions to sell and how many you want to keep for holding, airdrops, or for selling on other marketplaces.

Finally, you’ll need to configure your sale, but we’ve made the process easy. Simply give us a starting price and maximum price, we’ll calculate the rest for you!

With Quickminter, you can quickly have a full-featured ArtDEX pool with your new NFT available for sale. This minting recipe also uses the new Multipool contract, which means your pool creation costs will only be about 0.1xtz!

We’ll cover more about Multipool in a later section.

Deepminter

The core idea around Deepminter is the same as Quickminter; this contract helps you mint a new ARTWK and deploy a new ArtDEX pool in one simple transaction.

Deepminter adds the ability to deeply customize the resulting ArtDEX pool. With Deepminter, you can make both one-way and bi-directional trading pools, and fine-tune your pool’s delta value & fees.

Certain configurations of Deepminter creations will allow users to implement on-chain royalties. Implementing on-chain royalties requires interfering with the normal transfer process, and making sure that token transfers only go through your ArtDEX pools.

As of now, we’re focusing on getting our minting tools right. We are looking to work privately with creators who’d like to demo on-chain royalties, so please reach out! We will release the feature to the public if there is enough demand for the tool.

Multipool Architecture

The new Mintery goes hand in hand with the new ArtDEX Multipool.

Multipool is a special deployment contract that works using Tezos BigMap, meaning that pools will be stored directly in the Multipool contract and not in a new contract. We received feedback stating that the 3xtz cost of creating a new ArtDEX pool was too much, and this is our response.

This brings the costs of pool creation down from 3xtz to 0.1xtz.

There are just a couple drawbacks when using the shared pool. One is the minor loss of decentralization, which is always going to come when moving from external contracts to one shared contract. The other is that external contracts can accept airdrops and other holding-based rewards for NFTs that offer them.

Still, we don’t think this will be a major issue moving forward. Multipool will be the default on ArtDEX going forward, and it will be the right choice for most users.

Users will be able to choose between using Multipool and making a new contract for any pool creation on ArtDEX.

Creator Tips

When we launched ArtDEX, we set it up to be a free-for-all aimed at high-volume NFT traders. We think that ArtDEX does serve NFT traders well, but when we take a step back and look at all actors in the ArtDEX protocol, there are improvements to be made around incentive alignment.

On ArtDEX, we have 3 main actors: Creators, Liquidity Providers (LPs), and Traders. Creators post new works on ArtDEX, LPs deposit NFTs & XTZ that allows Traders easy access to NFTs and arbitrage opportunities.

As of now, the incentives are a bit too tilted toward the Traders group of users. We’d like to fix this.

As a core principal, Genius Contracts does not support off-chain royalties as they are currently implemented. There are major flaws to this model, and our stance is that we need to look toward a future where creators can receive guaranteed income and use on-chain royalty contracts rather than relying on one line of client-side JavaScript as a revenue stream.

While that is our stance, we do believe that creators should get a cut of ArtDEX volume. To that end, we’re starting a non-optional Creator Tips program where 2% of each trade on ArtDEX will go directly to the NFT creator as a tip.

The 2% tip is the absolute minimum. We will be opening up this amount to SalsaDAO governance, by using a Curve Voting pool to vote on an additional percentage to the tip. This means that SalsaDAO community will be able to vote the Creator Tip up to 10% or even higher.

GC will be showing good faith to artists by committing to a 100,000 $sDAO vote on 3% additional tip, bringing the site-wide royalty to 5%.

It’s All About Price Discovery

Why are we doing all of this? Our goal is to show creators and other people who may not be as deep into DeFi as we are, that price discovery is king in crypto.

Creators are leaving money on the table by selling their wares inefficiently. Using ArtDEX effectively will lead to an increase in profits from primary sales, as you can extract more profit from initial demand. Plus, this strategy can easily be combined with income from legacy royalties.

Why not go for both?

In a quick example, lets go through how inefficient liquidity hurts an NFT sale. Imagine the same sale run on different marketplaces; the left is on a classic NFT listing marketplace, and the right is on ArtDEX.

As you can see, adding a tiny delta of 0.001xtz to the initial price of 1xtz has an outsized effect: the overall sale raised almost 30% more when using flexible liquidity on ArtDEX. This is the impact of having liquidity that reacts to market demand.

Going further, each item in the ArtDEX pool was bought at an average price of 1.25xtz. This shows that selling on a curve doesn’t break the bank for buyers either, which keeps your sale attractive!

In crypto, new mints and shiny toys become old in weeks. Focusing on initial demand is absolutely key to extending your journey in this space, unless you are in the top 5–10% of artists or already have a major following.

ArtDEX helps you sell better.

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ArtDEX v1.1 is coming this week. With Version 1.1, we will deliver an upgraded experience for creators, traders, and liquidity providers!